Tuesday, November 15, 2016

COP22 Day 2 and More Data Mining

It looks like Day 2 of COP22 is shaping up to be a Trump Administration versus The World while UN Sec. Gen. Ban Ki-moon sought to assuage fears of a US pullout of the Paris Agreement stating in part:
"As a very successful business person, I believe that he[Donald Trump] understands there are market forces already at work on this issue, and that we need to harness these forces for the good of the planet."

I know that Trump is not a very good businessman as he has vastly under-performed the S&P 500 index with reinvested dividends since he inherited many tens of millions of dollars from his family, and would be wealthier today.(sources are everywhere)

Still, pretty shrewd politically.

In other COP22 news Sarkozy floats plan for carbon tariffs on US goods if Trump tears up Paris Agreement, and to his credit Sarkosy first proposed such a vehicle in 2010. Of course he's part of the French contingent that, along with the Chinese, fabricated the global warming hoax in order to make US manufacturing non-competitive. Or some such nonsense. Yep. That's our president-elect. Not a deep thinker, that one.

In later yesterday COP22 news, Reuters reported that Germany and the European Commission rejected -- for now at least-- a call for a carbon tax on US emissions. This could get pricey. The EU members trade greenhouse gases via a market; which yesterday traded at $5.79/ton(yes, that's the US measurement as we are too lazy to learn the metric system). At 5,334,000,000 tons(again US units) that would be a lot.

Despite what is so glaringly obviously in the best interests of the 7.1 billions of humans that do not live in the US, it will never happen as whatever the US says, goes.

Only the US, and those the US authorizes, can flaunt international agreements.

That's all from COP22.

Now, regarding yesterday's post concerning oceanic carbon scrubbing capacity declines, I have a bit more color.

The issue is simple chemistry(apologies to chemists). When the oceans absorb CO2, they become more acidic. Here's the chemistry:

The very definition of an acid is a substance that donates hydrogen ions. Thus, when every molecule of CO2 is dissolved in sea water, two hydrogen ions are released via the above reducing the pH, as carbonic acid is a product. The arrows represent the manner in which the reactants are reversible. That's enough chemistry :)

Without resorting to thermodynamic equations, colder water supports more gases dissolved per unit, so polar waters have grown the most acidic of all(terribly sorry about the lack of a segue there, but I am tired, and I will onlt rewrite if time and inclination warrant such)

Two takeaways here. One, the polar waters will lose their ability to absorb atmospheric carbon as they reach the saturation point, and two, as the polar waters heat those waters will radically lose their ability even faster due to heating. It is these types of feedback mechanisms that have been known about for a very long time, but only in the past few decades have people though much about doing anything about mitigating the worst effects of climate change.

Fun facts!: Joseph Fourier discovered the greenhouse effect in the 1820s. Following right along and dramatically expounding on Fourier's work was John Tyndall. "Tyndall explained the heat in the Earth's atmosphere in terms of the capacities of the various gases in the air to absorb radiant heat, also known as infrared radiation. His measuring device, which used thermopile technology, is an early landmark in the history of absorption spectroscopy of gases. He was the first to correctly measure the relative infrared absorptive powers of the gases nitrogen, oxygen, water vapour, carbon dioxide, ozone, methane, etc. (year 1859)." Tyndall did other amazing work, but this work really makes me feel how stupid humans are.

One more aside.. I cannot find this on the Interwebs, but it is inside one of James Lovelock's books or a news article from the early to mid 1980s. I'll need to paraphrase. Lovelock entertained the idea of going before the National Academy of Sciences(why not the Royal Society I know not)and proposing to pump millions of tons of CO2 and other gases into the atmosphere as an experiment. He asked, 'can you imagine how ridiculous that would seem?' But that is precisely what we as a planet have been doing for scores of years, but now it is billions of tons! I did not need the question. I have been espousing a cleaner, greener planet since the 1970s.

Getting back on track..

In shallower parts of the world's oceans where photosynthetic plant life flourishes, the carbon retention rate is 15 times that of even the best of forested terrestrial land according to The International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN). That's an older report(2009), but I have seen no contradictory data. Human activities are destroying these true 'lungs of the earth.' Sorry rainforests, I love you, but I have to follow the data.

The loss of coastal ecosystems at present is somewhere in the 4% to 7% annual range. Much as one might do in computing compound interest in savings or in the stock market over time, this loss too is compounded. This rate has been accelerating of late(see Waycott et. al.). The reasons are all anthropogenic. The losses come from runoff pollution, coastal development(an oxymoron if ever there was), fishing operations that use trawl nets, logging of mangroves, and aquaculture...in addition to acidification and coastal waters heating. It not only sounds dire, it is dire.

I'm not very fond of humans at present, but it is estimated that 1 billions of us get our protein in form of fish from these very ecosystems.

I have more to say, but I am going to close by giving you one film to view, and some popular books to read.

I finally watched DiCaprio's Before The Flood last night, and it was pretty good. If you are reading this there likely won't be much new information, but in this one instance I will recommend that you find a public torrent site, download the film and distribute it to your climate change denying family and friends. Nat. Geo. and Mr. DiCaprio offered free viewings prior to the release, and I feel certain that both bodies would encourage you to do likewise.

Books

Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life by E.O. Wilson. It's a Pulitzer winner, and a damned fine read.

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert is another Pulitzer winner, and like E.O. Wilson, this staff writer for The New Yorker can really tell a story. I told her how much I enjoyed the book and how important I found it. I am going to send a brand new copy to her and have her autograph it.

No links to purchase film and books. Copy and paste titles into the search box of your favorite store for more ;)

That was way too much to try and accomplish in an hour, but I have bills to pay and I need food, liquids and rest :)

Oh. I would have really cleaned this thing up prior to posting but I am thinking in HTML and left no paragraph breaks in this rambling text. It's a dense block of text and I am posting from my tablet. Bad call.

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